Pittsburgh Connects to Ultrafast Grid

A light pipeline ties the East to the West of national cyberinfrastructure.

PITTSBURGH, August 25, 2003  The
nation’s most powerful, academically-based computing resource
— LeMieux, the
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s terascale system —
is now linked with supercomputers in Illinois and California as
part of the TeraGrid, an
integrated national system of cyberinfrastructure.

Network engineers at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center (PSC) successfully implemented and tested
a light pipeline that connects PSC to the Chicago hub of the
TeraGrid’s high-speed “backplane,” which links
the five TeraGrid sites.

“Along with providing an eastern U.S. node for the TeraGrid,” said
PSC scientific directors Mike Levine and Ralph Roskies in a joint statement,
“this is an important first step toward a wide-area computational grid
that encompasses terascale systems of different architecture.”

Funded by the National Science
Foundation, the TeraGrid is a multi-year effort to deploy the
world’s fastest, most comprehensive distributed-computing
infrastructure for open scientific research. Analogous to an
electrical power grid, the TeraGrid makes computational power
available to scientists and engineers nationwide as a seamless
resource, without regard to physical location of the computing
systems on the grid.

“Many of us in many places are working together to create the
TeraGrid,” said Rick Stevens of Argonne National Laboratory and the
University of Chicago, TeraGrid project director. “This work will empower
U.S. research in science and engineering for years to come. The Pittsburgh to
Chicago connection is a major step toward bringing this vision of integrated
national cyberinfrastructure into reality.”

Implemented
in February, the TeraGrid’s Chicago-Los Angeles backplane
moves data at 40 gigabits per second, the fastest network in the
world. It is referred to as a backplane — a circuit board
with plug-in slots for other devices — because the TeraGrid
is conceived of as a single national machine for science and
engineering research, with powerful systems in different places
that plug-in to the backplane. The Pittsburgh to Chicago link
currently operates at 10 gigabits per second. The rate will triple
to 30 gigabits per second this fall, when two more fiber-optic
pipelines — called lambdas — are implemented.

Phase I of the TeraGrid, to be available in December 2003, will offer four
teraflops of computing power, consisting of more than 800 Itanium-family
processors (running the Linux operating system), at SDSC, NCSA, Argonne and
CACR. LeMieux, an HP system comprising 3,000 Alpha processors (Tru64 UNIX
operating system), will add six teraflops of processing power but also poses
the challenge of “interoperability” — to create a grid
environment integrating heterogeneous system architectures. The TeraGrid has
established a PSC-led Interoperability Working Group to develop the necessary
software.

The PSC lambda connects directly to a router, supplied by Cisco Systems, Inc., located in
the PSC machine room in Monroeville, outside of Pittsburgh. A
device called an Application Gateway will bridge between the router
and LeMieux. The Application Gateway will run software, developed
by PSC, that translates between the TeraGrid network and
LeMieux’s internal network.